Ann Brashares: Likeness

“Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.”

“The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched.”

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ”
“Ready.”
“At least I tried.”

“Particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. Once you know them you mostly forgot about it.”

“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.”

“Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.”

“Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.”

“Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.”

“She was astonished, and at the same time she knew. There were many things in life like that. You couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.”

“Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.”

“She liked the life she had. She loved habits. She craved a day with nothing in it, a long, quiet stretch of hours in the studio.”

“when life gives you lemons, say, "yeah I like lemons, what else ya got"?”

“Carmen didn't like change, and she certainly didn't like endings.”

“But like everything else, love changed.”

“she never showed girly weaknesses like cellulite or crushes. she never lingered on injustices committed against her.”

“Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself…. As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.”